


Lost: One Trench Coat, Battered and Worn but Much Loved

by daikonjou



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-10
Updated: 2012-03-10
Packaged: 2017-11-01 17:57:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/359653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daikonjou/pseuds/daikonjou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jimmy survives Castiel's previous deaths. He's sort of grateful, except for the part where he's sharing headspace with some million souls and things that should never have left Purgatory on top of a Castiel who is now quite occupied with playing God.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost: One Trench Coat, Battered and Worn but Much Loved

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to beg for leniency on account of this being my first foray into Supernatural fic, but to be fair begging for mercy so blatantly isn't really my style and I would imagine people have to start somewhere anyway, so if it's terrible I can just delude myself into thinking that at least I can't get worse. This was born in the wee hours of the morning at a dear friend's place and is crossposted on tumblr at this time at the insistence of another dear friend who was quite adamant about reading it. Also naturally none of the characters involved are mine and I'm not making any sort of profit off this.

The abyss stretches endless below him. Jimmy Novak stands on the brink of it, watching a bright, blue-white light as it’s swarmed by black shadows trailing motes of black ooze. It’s almost as if a storm of comets (captured in a photograph, colors inverted) have come to life and bitterly resent everything else in existence. Castiel has not spoken to him since the army of fanged souls appeared, and Jimmy has the creeping suspicion his body won’t last. The ones with fangs and claws, the ones who prey on humans, are not frightening. They are only souls. Power, to Castiel. Power Castiel cannot or will not take from the lone soul of Jimmy Novak, pressed into a corner between a long drop and the fog of sheer nothing by the surging masses of wailing creatures.

But the ones that howl and snap at the light of Castiel’s grace are sticky and oily and Jimmy knows better than to let them touch him, lest they consume him and he is forever lost within their murky depths. Like tar or quicksand or some kind of primordial, corrupt goo, they make him think that once caught he will only sink faster if he should struggle. Sometimes they cover the light completely, and Jimmy lingers alone in the dark with vampires and werewolves and wraiths and the rather… _uniquely_ named Jefferson Starships screaming in the ooze’s dripping tones until Castiel fights his way free of the stuff again.

 _Castiel_ , they say. _Castieeeeel._

The stuff has a way of swallowing one’s thoughts and consuming one’s attention, even without touching him. Love, Jimmy thinks, swallowing with a throat he shouldn’t have anymore as a passenger in his own body. Love and warmth and Claire’s smile and Amelia’s embrace. Light. Happiness. Castiel’s light, when he descended upon him and made him into a vessel for his overwhelming power. Not so overwhelming, though, when he’s been locked into the back of Castiel’s mind as a subconscious presence when the angel lost his grace. Not so overwhelming when their body has been blown to bits. Twice.

Jimmy tries again, ignoring the anguished wailing of all the souls trapped in his body with him, with Castiel. Love, he begins. Warmth. Light. The taste of a really good hamburger. The joy of watching his daughter grow. The affection for his wife. The blind loyalty to the Winchester brothers.

That was not his, he thinks. It must have bled over when Castiel fell and became human, human but for the tiny shred of Jimmy remaining in his skull. The tiny shred of Jimmy that has lost taste and color and sensation, lost many things, felt all his joys and loves and laughters go dim in what is left of his memory. He licks the lips he does not have to himself anymore and watches the waves of black wash over Castiel’s grace.

 _Castieeeel. Castieeeeeeeeel,_ the ooze whispers in too many tones to be any singular thing.

Purgatory, Jimmy remembers. Castiel used his body to travel about, used it to speak with Crowley, used it to make a bargain. Used it to open Purgatory, used it as a receptacle to swallow down a million wailing monster souls. They are quiet, for now, crying out only when the darkness chasing Castiel’s light speaks.

_Castieeeeeeel. Castiel, can you hear us?_

Castiel does not answer, his grace flaring sharply and driving back the shadows a bit. Just a bit; they return soon. And then they begin slowly to cover the light again, slowly, slowly, slowly washing over Castiel’s grace like a rising tide, or the onset of nightfall. A wraith’s soul ventures too close to the ooze and is promptly devoured.

Jimmy curls in his corner and watches the light’s harsh pulse, watches it send out questing tendrils to spear a vampire here, a werewolf there, a Jefferson Starship over there, watches as the souls are consumed. The monsters wail when one of their brethren is eaten and when the black things call. Souls are powerful, Jimmy knows. Souls are powerful and there is something to be said that he lingers even though he’d been but a wisp clinging to his old husk too many times for any reasonable mortal. There’s nothing stopping Castiel from simply eating him like the monster souls. Nothing except a promise to keep his family safe and a whirlwind of things he only ever remembers when Castiel is in the driver’s seat.

_Castieeeeeel. Do you know what we are?_

Castiel does not answer.

\--

At some point Jimmy Novak falls asleep and doesn’t dream, soul wavering in the place between passing on and clinging stubbornly to its former shape. Former, because Castiel is no longer merely using him as a vessel, because the body is no longer really Jimmy’s. One doesn’t just explode twice and come back, angelic timeshare in their meat shell intact, without it becoming abundantly clear that the body’s meant for Castiel and not him. He wonders why he hasn’t faded yet. Perhaps some remnant of Castiel’s former angelic power still needs a body with a soul. Perhaps because Death has no desire or need to send for him. Perhaps there’s something else he’s to worry about that would never have been a problem with the old Castiel.

A sharp pain in Jimmy’s hand. The ooze snickers, laughs, taunts Castiel. Two sharp pains, then. Perhaps he would have sores if he could look outside the plane he’s locked in to see the planet he once lived on, since downsized to the inside of his mind. Castiel’s mind now too, he thinks, or whatever results when one interfaced a human brain with an angel of the Lord. Bitter is not the word he’d use, because he had consented to it. He had chained himself back onto the comet plunging straight for Earth, straight over it, always attuned to the Winchester brothers. Always tracking Dean Winchester when he could, Dean Winchester whom he loved more than power or life or his brothers in Heaven. Always listening for Dean’s call, even while wandering the earth healing and smiting as an angry, lonely god. An angry, lonely, love-starved god, forsaken by the Winchesters whom he loved and who no longer trusted him.

Perhaps not a god, though Jimmy is careful not to let that thought leak too far away from him. Castiel leaves him be, seems to have forgotten that he is not alone in his head. He licks his dry lips and stares at the sundered landscape, wonders if it had ever been anything other than a wasteland with a gaping canyon’s maw beneath a toxic sky. Perhaps it had once been a garden, Jimmy thinks. A garden that stretched beyond his mind’s eye, filled with life. Maybe there had been birds with small white wings and greater black ones. An entrance marked by stone and mortar posts, two of them, topped with lamps, tucked into beds of yellow flowers. A pathway marked by dark paving stones. Snow—wait, snow?

_Castieeeeeel. Castieeeeeeeeel._

\--

Jimmy thinks very hard about what this plane might have been like before, curled in a tight ball as the monsters prowl closer. They do not seem to see him at all, but they are all merely souls and perhaps they have no interest in touching the broken soul of a human man. No, perhaps he is not broken yet. He merely looks like he is.

He thinks a little harder and a blade of grass sprouts by his elbow. Incredulous, he stares at it for a while. Another blade grows. There’s something not quite right about them; the tips are neatly clipped. Less like a garden and more like a lawn. Jimmy frowns.

 _Who are you_? Castiel demands, and the goo answers him.

_We are Leviathan._

Leviathan’s pronouncement sends a gale of miasma screaming through the landscape. The blades of grass curl together, shrivel, wilt.

He blacks out.

\--

When he wakes the grass is gone and he’s surrounded by wasteland, huddled into the small margin between charred land and oblivion. The vast crevasse of nothing splitting the land has grown, Jimmy thinks fearfully. If he tries to uncurl from his position he thinks he might fall into its depths, the edge crumbling ever so slightly with every motion, every twitch of his muscles. Castiel’s light continues hovering over the abyss, pulsing fiercely like the heartbeat of a small sun.

Jimmy’s stomach abruptly squirms horribly, like something is trying to push its way out of him from the inside of his stomach. He swallows, scoots back away from the brink until his back hits cold nothingness, props himself up gingerly to retch and wheeze until the nauseating feeling subsides. The monsters have retreated to the fringes of the charred earth, skirting oblivion on one side and a bottomless drop on the other. One Jefferson Starship had come sniffing him out, running preternaturally quick over the landscape, but the abyss yawned wider and it fell screaming into the depths, scrabbling at the walls with bony spikes protruding from its wrists. Not that they did any good, not when the laws of physics didn’t seem to apply and the crumbling, cracking earth that seemed so unstable beneath Jimmy’s feet was solid enough simply to shear off the spikes in question and send the hapless creature tumbling into the void, screaming in pain on top of fear.

It’s not his pain erupting at seemingly random over his body. It’s Castiel’s, he realizes with a jolt. Castiel, who shines in a harried way and is _losing_ , Leviathan gaining ground every time he compacts himself into a denser, brighter form. Grace is only so much against darkness older and greater than angels.

\--

When he opens his eyes, it’s indoors and dimly lit and the Winchesters are staring at him like they’re seeing a ghost. When he opens his mouth it’s Castiel who speaks. “I need your help.” Between one blink and the next he’s back in the wasteland. Castiel’s light flickers under the ooze covering it.

\--

The monsters have all gone deadly still, for some reason. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting. The only thing that moves now is him and Castiel’s wavering, shaking light, and Leviathan, moving quicker than before, spreading out more easily over Castiel’s grace, like animated crude oil if it stank of old blood and cruelty. Doing its utmost to drown Castiel in its darkness.

“Ready to go?” someone asks from behind him, which should be impossible because there’s _nothing_ behind him.

Gingerly, Jimmy pushes himself up. He can sit up, at least. Strange aches play over his body, on top of the sores he’s sure he’s developed but can never see when he looks down at himself. He half-expects Castiel when he turns, even though he knows Castiel is occupied by the outside and Leviathan.

It’s not. Instead of an angel a man of somewhat indeterminate age stands in the shifting fog of nothing, feet squarely placed upon solid ground that shouldn’t exist, and examines a pocket watch. He tucks it back into the pocket of his perfectly pressed black suit. “It’s almost time,” the man says.

“Who—“ Jimmy begins, then stops himself. “ _What_ are you?”

“A Reaper,” says the man. He doesn’t bother to give a name. “Your time is almost up. It’s best if you come quietly, but I can wait I suppose. Not very long, though.”

“Castiel’s still fighting.”

“Yes, I know,” the Reaper says, almost impatiently.

“So I need to stay.”

“You have a choice, you know,” the Reaper tells him. “You can stay and risk getting locked into Purgatory when Castiel puts all these souls back where they’re supposed to be, because there’s no guarantee you won’t get caught up in the mass exodus, or you can leave now and go to Heaven like you were supposed to ages ago. Really, the bookkeepers are getting tired of seeing you. You and Castiel and the Winchesters have all been rather… impermanent records in the books. It’s getting tiresome.”

“Castiel still needs me,” Jimmy says, and wonders when it became _Castiel needs me_ instead of _my family needs me_.

“Castiel’s time isn’t up yet, seeing as he’s not as tied to this body as you are.”

“What does that—“

“You’re smart enough to do the math, aren’t you? Put two and two together? You’re dying. That’s why Castiel went to the boys when Sam Winchester called him. You’re dying and he’s losing control.”

Oh. For a moment he’s angry, because when he signed his body over to Castiel he expected him to _try_ to take care of it. But he’s been shot and stabbed and dragged miles across the country in the blink of an eye and he’s drunk an entire liquor store and had a hangover of legendary proportions and _other angels_ have exploded him into little bits _twice_. After all of that this seems… odd. Mundane.

“It’s really not,” the Reaper points out, dry. “Most people don’t have to house an angel and a million monster souls and primordial entities from the beginning of time who were locked in Purgatory for a damn good reason until Flyboy and the current king of Downstairs opened up a door they weren’t supposed to be able to access.”

“You’re not what I expected you to look like,” Jimmy says.

“Were you expecting the Pale Rider himself? Yeah, no, sorry, you’re nowhere near significant enough for the boss to come personally.”

“I’m hallucinating you, aren’t I?”

The Reaper gives him an almost pitying look. “Souls don’t generally hallucinate. Now, if you’ve seen Hell, that’s another story, but Castiel probably knew better than to let you.”

“Then…”

“Yeah, I’m the real deal. Normally I wouldn’t be standing here jawing at you. It’s inefficient and we’re pretty busy, but what with everything running around in there even I’m not sure what the rules are.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, James Novak, that there’s a bloody war being raged in you over the rules of reality. You’re on one side. Castiel is sort of on your side, but that’s only because angels have no imagination. Leviathan is an army of its own. All of the monsters are their own separate sides. This is why you’re sitting in a wasteland and there’s a chasm down the middle that nobody wanted and no one can close. You’re being torn apart as we speak. You can resist, but in the end you’ll either get sucked into Purgatory, get eaten by Leviathan when it inevitably wins, or you can come with me now and we’ll have time to take the scenic route through your memories as a little farewell party.”

“Why are you bothering to explain?” Sometimes Jimmy wonders what life would have been like if he’d said no. If he’d taken his pills and continued on his mercifully insignificant existence as Jimmy Novak, salesman of ad time on AM radio. The man who said grace with his family before every meal and dutifully went to church on Sundays and wore the same battered old trench coat in the cold that Amelia was beginning to eye with fond exasperation.

“Because,” the Reaper says, leaning in close, “we figured you were one amoeba who ought to know. A little bit of repayment for Castiel cutting the boss’ leash. One insignificant speck in the grand scheme of things who shouldn’t have come back so many times, who should have died that night with the bullet in your gut and Castiel staring you in the face with Claire Novak’s eyes, but you made a choice. You left your wife and daughter and gave Castiel the rest of your severely shortened life to make use of you, and he rode you hard. And I need you to step out here or be trapped in Purgatory or be eaten by Leviathan.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“Only because you think there’s nothing there.”

“He needs me,” Jimmy says, lamely. Castiel doesn’t need him, exactly. It’s just that after Rachel and Balthazar and the Winchesters’ horror when Castiel spoke and his every word crackled with power he’d never possessed before, Jimmy Novak is the only friendly fixture from Castiel’s better days left. He’s stayed with Castiel because he’s not had very much choice in the matter, but maybe Castiel can use his soul as a last-ditch power source, because he’d rather have Castiel eat him to win against Leviathan than watch as the black goo overpowered Castiel who had sucked a million monster souls dry but never tapped his energy. He isn’t quite sure how he knows this, but then again he’s learned a lot of things over the time the new powered-up Castiel had walked the earth playing God. The walls let slip little bits of information and he’d woken up with new things in his head every time his tiny consciousness blipped back into awareness.

“You have a rather overinflated sense of your own importance,” the Reaper retorts, somehow not unkindly. “He needed you as a vessel, but I’m afraid your usefulness in that capacity is soon to come to an end. You must decide soon. Ask him, if you’d like, though I doubt he has the energy to spare answering that question for you. You’re in pain, aren’t you? He’s feeling it too.”

Jimmy says nothing, turning his gaze towards the light in the sky, steadily shrinking in on itself as the oil-black ooze drips and slithers and seethes over it.

\--

The effort required to stand upright is staggering. Jimmy doesn’t know if Castiel is having the same problem (or maybe he is), but he pushes himself onto his feet and sways alarmingly, at last finding his balance without tumbling into the great crevasse.

The Reaper consults his pocket watch again. He mutters something Jimmy doesn’t quite catch and closes the cover with a snap, tucking it back into his pocket. “ _Tch_ , behind schedule.”

“What about—“

Jimmy doesn’t quite get to ask his question, interrupted by the abrupt appearance of a sigil in the sky over Castiel and the Leviathan ooze. It collapses into the yawning mouth of Purgatory, and all of the monsters remaining look skyward and launch themselves nearly involuntarily at it, captured by a wind current that tears at Jimmy’s coat and makes Leviathan scream horribly in rage. The wind picks up, carrying with it all of the monsters that had fallen into the abyss, dragging at Leviathan as it sinks hooks and claws into Castiel.

There’s something horrifying about the screaming of an angel. Jimmy’s only heard it once before, shortly before the flare of Castiel’s grace burning out and his reduction to a mere scrap of consciousness buried in Castiel’s (formerly his) brain. Eventually it stops, as the mouth of Purgatory closes. The monsters are gone.

For a time, everything goes dark. Jimmy hears nothing but the oil-slick shifting of Leviathan and the soft ticking of the Reaper’s pocket watch.

Then—

“ _Go, Jimmy. Go on to your reward.”_

Castiel’s grace is flickering irregularly, but the pain is suddenly gone and there is light. Not much, but Castiel illuminates the place well enough, still besieged by strangely calm ooze-comets though he is. The chasm is slowly closing, but as the land knits back together small springs of black ooze begin to well up by the seam.

“Won’t you need me?” Jimmy asks, in a whisper.

“ _There is nothing you can do_ ,” Castiel says. Then, “ _I am sorry.”_

It’s not clear whether he’s speaking to him or to someone else outside. The small springs are rapidly growing, and even the Reaper seems twitchy.

“ _You must go now!”_ the angel shouts, and Leviathan surges up from the springs, all teeth and terrible, terrible hunger.

“Come on,” the Reaper says. “Let’s go.” He holds out a hand, still standing in the nothing fog where the wasteland stops. Black ooze creeps towards Jimmy’s feet, no longer unsteady from pain.

“There’s nothing there.”

“Only because you think there’s nothing there. Come on.”

Jimmy squeezes his eyes shut and thinks of what the wasteland was supposed to be, if he’d had any say in the matter. He takes one step into the fog, finding paving stones underfoot. The creeping ooze recoils, pauses. He takes another step, feels the ooze slam up against an imaginary wall behind him where the wasteland met fog. _Goodbye, Castiel_ , he thinks, and walks on into the nothing. The Reaper is silent now, meeting him at the end of the path. They climb four grey steps Jimmy knows by heart together.

“Okay,” he says. He opens his eyes.

The Reaper takes his hand.


End file.
